MFX

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The Amiga Collection

The Commodore Amiga A500

The next few years nothing much really happened until I headed to university and purchased a full-sized keyboard (Yamaha PSR-200). A year later I purchased a second-hand Amiga A500 with a collection of discs, one of which contained a program called Pro-Tracker 2. That was my introduction to the tracking scene and I soon began creating ‘Mods’.

A while later and after the purchase of a sampler called Stereo Master, I was soon recording sounds from my PSR-200 and various other sources into the Amiga to compliment my compositions. There was certainly an art in making reasonable sounding tracks with 4 channels of 8-bit samples and a limit of 330k bytes on my system, but it was the beginning of my music production.

Protracker 2 Tracks

Despite the availability of a few trackers (OctaMed, Pro-Tracker), my preferred was Pro-Tracker 2 - see tracking can be learned here on Wikipedia. Once I had got to grips with it, I started to arrange my first tracks.

Below are MP3s of the majority of the tracks that I created on the Amiga. Some of these are not finished and all are of a very low quality compared to what is achievable by today's standards.

Elements
Personally, I think this is one of my weaker tracks.
23 Jul 1996

Freelight

23 Jul 1996

The Arabian
I'm not sure this is a complete track, but it was something that I quickly put together!
23 Jul 1996

The Navigator
Composed and arranged on the Amiga A500 using Pro Tracker. The opening chords were samples taken from the PSR-300. As the track progresses, the chord channels are replaced by other samples.
23 Jul 1996

Wilderness
Composed and arranged on the Amiga A500 using Pro Tracker. The opening samples were re-used from the track 'Devils Passage'. The other samples were ripped from Art of Noise! I'm unsure of the original date when I composed this piece. This track was never finished; this is the incomplete recording that loops at the end...
23 Jul 1996

No one Is Unknown
Composed and arranged on the Amiga A500 using Pro Tracker. The majority of the samples I took myself from the Yamaha PSR-300 keyboard.
01 Jul 1994

Infinity
Composed and arranged on the Amiga A500 using Pro Tracker. The majority of the samples I took myself from the Yamaha PSR-300 keyboard.
12 Feb 1994

It's Still a Mystery
Composed and arranged on the Amiga A500 using Pro Tracker. The piano samples were taken from an upright piano in the house (it was a little out of tune). Other samples were taken from a Yamaha PSR-300 that I had at the time.
26 Dec 1993

The Storm
Composed on the Amiga A500, with 8 bit samples taken from an old guitar kicking around the house, this piece of music was put together, inspired in part by the track 'Lilly Was Here' by David A. Stewart.
25 Dec 1993

Devils Passage
Composed and arranged on the Amiga A500 using Pro Tracker. I sampled my own breathing and used my own vocals (similar to Jean Michel-Jarre). I also used my own samples from a guitar with some echo effects. The remaining samples were taken from other modules. The specific date this track was arranged is unknown, but it was sometime in 1993.
01 Jun 1993

So Far Away
Composed and arranged on the Amiga A500 using Pro Tracker. The specific date this track was arranged is unknown, but it was sometime in 1993.
01 Jun 1993

The Sky's The Limit
Composed and arranged on the Amiga A500 using Pro Tracker. The majority of the samples I took myself from the Yamaha PSR-300 keyboard. The specific date this track was arranged is unknown, but it was sometime in 1993.
01 Jun 1993

Birds of Fire
This is personally one of my favourite tracks. It was originally composed and used on the Commodore 64 as a SID tune that I had compiled for the computer game Exrod. Later, I re-worked this on the Amiga A500 using Pro-tracker. The samples originate from all over. The vocals are my own and one of them was for a current girlfriend at the time (Edith). I am again unsure of the original date of this piece, but it was around 1992.
01 Jan 1992

SoundBlaster

With mixed results and some frustration with the limited resources of the Amiga, in 1997 I switched to the PC and discovered the SoundBlaster card and an awesome piece of DOS software called Scream Tracker. This was Pro Tracker on overdrive and with what seemed liked unlimited resources at the time, enabled me to compose pieces more inline with what I had imagined.

Continue on reading to PC Trackers...